Below The Horizon.

Out for a late afternoon walk close to home the other day and I managed to photograph the above scene. There are a couple of lessons I want to share with you regarding this. The title of this post, It Pays To Wait, is one of them and the other concerns an approach to photography that Stuart Sipahigil wrote about last year that has resonated with a lot of people. Before I get into those, a few details about the photograph for those of you who are curious about that kind of thing. It is of the crepuscular rays after the sun dips below the horizon as viewed looking over the Danshui River and out to sea. I shot it with a Canon 5D Mark II and 17-40mm lens at 17mm. The camera was mounted on a carbon fiber tripod and a 3-stop graduated neutral density filter was used to give an exposure time of 3.2 seconds at f16 ISO100.

It Pays To Wait

I hadn’t really set out to photograph the sunset in particular. Rather, I’d just gone out for a late afternoon walk along the river because it was such a nice day. As the sun started to sink, the sky around it was very clear and the sun itself was just an orange ball. As far as sunsets go, it was actually kind of boring, and I noticed a lot of tourists and day trippers shooting with camera phones and small digicams turned around to instead watch the almost full moon come up in the east. About 10 to 15 minutes after the sun set, the conditions came right and the sky produced the show you can see above. It only lasted a very short time, and I know a lot of photographers nearby were scrambling to get their gear back out of their bags and set their tripods up again. Conditions can and do change very quickly at that time of day, and it always pays to wait after the sun has gone down as you never know what nature has in store. An extra 10 or 20 minutes of patience can make all the difference between a great photograph and a failed photoshoot.

Close To Home

This shot is very much in keeping with the philosophy described in Stuart Sipahigal’s “Close To Home”. Great pictures can be found at your doorstep. It’s easy to look at the work of travel photographers, see their images and think that if only we could travel to Paris or Brasil or Tibet, we too could create great images. Or to look at the work of a landscape photographer and think that if we had the time to hike into the back country or high into the mountains we could produce works of art. Great photos though are available everywhere, and that includes close to your home. I’ve lived in a few different cities in a few different countries and I’ve always found inspiration at my doorstep. Grab your camera, head out your front door and take a walk. Stuart and fellow photographer Ray Ketchum are running the Close To Home workshops starting this month. If you’re interested, check them out.

Oils at a day spa in Taiwan

Following on from the success of Clarion Call, Selina Maitreya is organizing another photography telesummit scheduled to take place in June. Clarion Call II will be a one day event on June 10th. We got together on Skype yesterday to chat for a while about Pricing From Value and covered topics like how photographers can assess value and what constitutes value. You can listen to it below.

pricingfromvalue.mp3

You can sign up for Clarion Call II here.

Here is the press release announcing Clarion Call II.

Clarion Call II Press Release

Clarion Call JUNE 2011; Professional Photography Telesummit Offered For Commercial Photographers

(Acton, Ma)
Seven of the world’s greatest photography experts have joined commercial photography consultant, Selina Maitreya, for a world wide, online event to teach commercial photographers how to effectively price, negotiate, and license assignmet photography in today’s market. The goal is to empower photographers by providing them with pivotal information from national clients, respected consultants and successful photographers working daily in our industry.

Photographers will be asked to pay a fee to attend this event. However photographers will decide how much they pay. “ In the spirit of community I am asking photgraphers to look into their heart to see how much time they will spend with us and how much value they feel they will receive.” states Maitreya. “Then they should look into their wallets to see how much they can afford. There is a price point for everyone.”

Clarion Call JUNE 2011; Professional Photography Telesummit will take place June 10 ,2011 from 12p.m. –7p.m. est This is a live event hosted by Maitreya.

Clarion Call II website

Each featured expert will share their knowledge, insights and industry secrets on how commercial photographers can price, negotiate and license assignment photography and grow their business in today’s economy. Included are leading experts in the professional photography industry including :Aric Rist :NIKE Global Brand Photography Manager, Art Buyer Beverly Adler, ASMP National education Director and photographer Susan Carr, Photo Closer Frank Meo, Videographer Gail Mooney, and International Consultant Maria Piscopo.

Items of discussion will include: The project rate pricing formula, how to set you base rate, the clients perspective, negotiating steps to take to getting to yes, setting rates for motion, how to price for multiple useages.

During the seven hours of nonstop content, participants will learn:

How and why photographers who “value” themselves are able to negotiate hire fees.
What questions you need to ask in order to bid a project with multiple useages.
What the two most important questions are to ask when bidding a project. Miss this and you miss lots of business.
Secrets to getting your prospects to spill the beans about their budget.
Why win- win negotiating is what works and how to set the tone for a win for all.
How to price for motion.
Keys to building an effective quote.
How to learn who you are competing against.
When walking is the right move.
How to utilize pricing tools for success.
How to build a business that will THRIVE!
“If there’s one thing I know about the photography industry there is always something to learn. Yet, who we learn from is extremely important,” shares Maitreya.

“As a photography consultant I am committed to helping as many photographers succeed in their business. For this reason I encourage you to join me and 7 leading experts for a telesummit that will rock your world.

Seating is limited for this event. Registration details may be found at the Clarion Call website.

Transcripts and recordings for purchase will be available following the event.

Dawn In The Evening

Some photographs are nothing more than being in the right place at the right time. Cases like that, turning up sometimes seems like it’s all that you need to do. Other photographs require a lot of planning and preparation with a fair amount of patience thrown in for good measure. Then there are others that you see in your mind and know it’s possible to create even though the conditions you’re faced with aren’t optimal. Such was the situation I found myself in last Sunday. My wife’s company organizes a monthly event for staff and clients and this time they decided on a day trip to the tourist village of Jiufen on the north coast of Taiwan about an hour out of Taipei. It’s a popular place for Taiwan photographers but this wasn’t meant to be a photography trip but it is a picturesque place and most, if not all, people were carrying cameras of various kinds. As we wandered through the lanes and alleyways of Jiufen, the group split up and headed off in directions with plans to meet back at a certain spot at a certain time. We found ourselves in a tea house that had an excellent view of the East China Sea to the north and the foothills stretching away westward towards the city of Keelung. As I looked out over the hills, I could “see” an image in my mind that I thought would look great. That’s what you see at the top of the page which I call Dawn In The Evening. Why? Well, my mental image before I picked up the camera was the same type of view but as a first light kind of photo not an evening photo. Now when your view is west, you’re obviously not going to get the same effect in the early hours of the day but with a bit of work in the digital darkroom, it’s possible to create something similar. Take a look after the jump at the original unedited RAW image as it came into Lightroom.

View as it came into Lightroom

As you can see in the histogram above, the photograph is about one and a half stops underexposed. If I had have been there specifically for photography, I would have spent a bit more time with it at the time of shooting to ensure a more accurate exposure. When I shot this I was in the middle of a conversation and pretty much just picked up my camera and shot from my seat in the teahouse. My idea for the shot had it being a lot cooler, so the first thing I did upon import into Lightroom was change the white balance. I selected tungsten from the white balance menu and that looked like a pretty good starting point to me.

Tungsten white balance.

As you can see, the simple act of changing the white balance has pushed the exposure to the right while giving it the blue tone that brought things closer to my original intention for the image. There’s still more to be done though, starting with a crop. You can’t really see it in the above images but when viewed at 1:1 in Lightroom there were also three bright spots in the lower right that came from what I think were motorcycle headlights or LED street lights. As well as cropping (keyboard shortcut – R) to remove some sky, I used the spot removal tool (keyboard shortcut – Q) to remove the distractign bright spots.

Cropped and some spot removal.

Things are looking better but my original idea had a darker foreground with the image lightening as you move through it to a pink / purplish sky. A couple of graduated filters got me started on that. Immediately below is a graduated filter for the sky that adds some tone and under that one for the foreground that darkens it. The second one served to brighten the sky though which weakened the effect of the first graduated filter but still left a bit of tone. Between the two is a screenshot of the filter placement for the first graduated filter.

Graduated filter to tone the sky.

Screen shot of the graduated filter for the sky.

Graduated filter to darken the foreground.

By this point I’m almost done. In fact, the photograph is looking pretty good now and I was almost tempted to leave it as that. But in the quest for just a little extra, I took the image out of Lightroom and into Nik Color Efex 3.0. Below is a screenshot from the software. I elected to use the skylight filter with a strength of 40. As you can see, it added that tone to the sky that I had visualized.

Nik Color Efex Pro 3.0 skylight filter

I could probably have either skipped the Lightroom graduated filters and done it all in Nik Color Efex Pro or spent some time with the adjustment brushes in Lightroom to achieve the same effect but this is the way it went this time. By this point I’m done and the result is the photograph you see at the top of the page. You can mouseover the photo below to see a before / after version of it.

Countless resolutions have been made in the holy city of Varanasi

Here we are at the end of a long, sometimes difficult and ultimately rewarding journey. Last year I resolved to create a 365 photo project with a difference – not just an image a day but a phototip of some kind a day. Some were easier than others but along the way I tried to cover a wide range of areas that would appeal to photographers of all levels, from the beginner first starting out to the seasoned professional. Making a photographic resolution and following through on it is a test of patience and discipline at times, but it’s worth it in the long run. I’ll write more about the whole process in a couple of weeks after I’ve had a chance to decompress a bit. For now though, let me ask you this.

What is your photographic resolution(s) for the year 2011?

If you feel really brave, drop a note mentioning it in the comments below and I’ll make sure to stay in touch with you and see how you’re progressing over the year.

Not sure what to do? Here are a few suggestions.

• A 365 project.
• Contact a potential new client every working day.
• A new personal project each month.
• Embrace multimedia and/or video.
• Create a portfolio worthy image each month.
• Seek out new avenues for your work.
• Begin learning a new style or genre of photography.
• Put on an exhibition.
• Start a photography club.
• Just an organisation such as IGVP.
• Apply for a photography grant.
• Step outside your comfort zone in some way.
• Take positive steps in your marketing with a telesummit such as Clarion Call 2011.

The list could be endless. The only thing limiting you in 2011 is your imagination and your dreams. So what are you waiting for? Get out there, create evocative images, tell compelling stories and make it a year to remember. Happy new year.

That was the 365th and final Daily PhotoTip in this series. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

Fireworks

With the new year fast approaching, one thing you can count on seeing over the next couple of days is fireworks. So how do you go about photographing fireworks?

Well, the good news is that it’s quite easy but there are a few things you’ll need. First, make sure that you have a camera that can be operated manually. Look for a “B” or bulb setting. You’ll also want to be able to focus manually. If you leave autofocus on and try to take photos like that, it’ll just hunt for something to lock onto in the black sky and you won’t get anything. Once you have the camera, you’ll need a sturdy tripod. This is a must as we are going to have exposure times of a few seconds and any camera shake will ruin the picture. Some kind of remote release is required as well. It doesn’t matter if it’s wired or wireless, as long as it’ll let you trip the shutter without needing to touch the camera.

t doesn’t matter how many auto modes your camera has. All those little icons of flowers and mountains are useless for fireworks. With your lens set to MF, focus on something in the distance. Once you are happy, recompose so that the camera is pointing to the area of sky where the fireworks will be but make sure you don’t change the focus. You may not need to do this if you are in an area with buildings, bridges etc.

With your ISO set to 100, shutter set to B, aperture between f8 and f16 and remote release in hand you are ready. Selecting an aperture between f8 and f16 gives you plenty of depth-of-field, and the shutter at B allows you to leave the shutter open for as long as you like. Press and hold the release button once to start the exposure and let go to stop it. A little trial and error may be required, so take as many shots as you can, with differing shutter times. If you can see the place where the fireworks are being launched from, you could try opening the shutter when you see the launch and closing it when the firework goes out. Or, you could leave it open and catch a few bursts of fireworks on the same exposure – hold a black card in front of the lens between bursts to cut down on any stray light.

Good luck and remember to stay safe and warm when you’re out photographing fireworks on these cold winter nights.

That was the 364th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

Yoga in the stream.

Every year, at around this time, the various media outlets out together their “best-of” features. Spending some time going through any of these can probably teach any photography a lot about composition, light, and storytelling. Most people I know love these features and you can easily spend a long time with each of them. For today’s phototip, I’ve collected links to best of 2010 features from a wide range of media sources. Grab a cup of coffee, sit back and enjoy some of the world’s most stunning photography from a busy year.

• AFP World Cup – AFP’s round up of the best World Cup images.
• Associated Press – AP’s best of 2010 news photos.
• Billboard – The best of the music and entertainment world from Billboard.
• The Big Picture – Boston.com’s famed photo blog has a three part series for 2010. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.
• CS Monitor – More than 50 000 frames on five continents went into this best of from the Christian Science Monitor.
• Denver Post – The Denver Post’s Plog is constantly posted great photo blog content. Here’s their round up of the year.
• Foreign Policy – Afghanistan 2010 – FP Magazine has a great selection of images from Afghanistan taken throughout the year.
• Greenpeace – The Greenpeace International Pictures desk have posted their selection of the best from the environment organization’s photographers.
• LIFE – Life Magazine needs no introduction and their 2010 best of is full of quality imagery.
• New York Times – 2010′s best photographs in the eyes of the New York Times.
• Reuters – Reuters were probably the first major media organization to post their best of the year.
• Time Magazine – Time often provides a few different categories in their roundup. This is for the best portraits.
• Wall Street Journal – WSJ has soem great images. I particularly like the opening one.

Follow the links above and they’ll keep you occupied for quite a while. Plenty of inspiration and education to be had.

That was the 363rd Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

By a stream .

2010 was a year that saw a number of excellent photography books released. Guides to social media, Lightroom and Photoshop resources, information on portfolios, essays on the photographic process, lighting, video and more, the state of the photography-related book market looks to be in great shape. Twitter, Facebook and the blogs were abuzz with discussions about different titles, and it seemed that every photographer was making regular trips to Amazon. Reading and looking at the work of others in a book form is a great way to find inspiration, boost your creativity or learn a new technique. Here’s a round up of some of my favorite releases from 2010.

Lindsay Adler and Rosh Sillars – The Linked Photographers’ Guide to Online Marketing and Social Media – I recently reviewed this very practical guide to online marketing and social media that gives you all you need to know to get started in this new field.

Syl Arena – LIDLIPS Lessons I Didn’t Learn In Photo School: 100 Modern Insights On Photography features 100 tips and insights into all aspects of photography.

Syl Arena – Speedliter’s Handbook: Learning to Craft Light with Canon Speedlites – I’ve been eagerly awaiting this and it has just been released. My copy hasn’t made it over to this side of the Pacific yet but I expect great things from it.

Sephi Bergerson – Street Food of India: The 50 Greatest Indian Snacks – Complete with Recipes – What’s a recipe book doing here you ask? Well, it was put out by a photographer and is full of great photographs. Plus some delicious recipes. Win-win.

David duChemin – Vision & Voice: Refining Your Vision in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom – The third in a series of books on vision, this takes you through the editing and processing side of things via Lightroom.

Scott Kelby – The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers – Another title I recently reviewed, this opened up a lot of area of Photoshop CS5 that I hadn’t been familiar with.

Joe McNally – LIFE Guide to Digital Photography: Everything You Need to Shoot Like the Pros – Everyone loves Joe McNally and this book, packed with beautiful images and aimed at the casual photographer, this book is sure to help you improve.

Nick Onken – Photo Trekking: A Traveling Photographer’s Guide to Capturing Moments Around the World – From preparation to breaking into the industry, Nick Onken takes you on a global journey.

Moose Peterson – Captured: Lessons from Behind the Lens of a Legendary Wildlife Photographer – Famed wildlife photographer Moose Peterson talks about why he shoots what he does and offers advice that will help make you a better photographer.

Galen Rowell – Galen Rowell’s Inner Game of Outdoor Photography – This re-release is full of essays and wonderful images from one of the world’s most renowned outdoor photographers. Galen Rowell was a big influence on a lot of photographers and those of you who have been inspired by him will want to get this.

Vincent Versace – Welcome to Oz 2.0: A Cinematic Approach to Digital Still Photography with Photoshop (2nd Edition) (Voices That Matter) – Rewritten and updated to 2.0, this popular book takes you into a Photoshop workflow for the cinematically minded.

Larry Volk and Danielle Currier – No Plastic Sleeves: The Complete Portfolio Guide for Photographers and Designers – A lot of photographers coming into the industry in the digital age may feel that there’s no need for a print book. That would be a mistake and here Volk and Currier show photographers and designers how to go about putting together a winning portfolio package. Essential reading if you a working photographer.

Undoubtedly, there are some books I’ve forgotten to include in this list. As I mentioned earlier, it was a stellar year for photography books and the sample above are ones I’ve personally bought. What books have excited you this year?

That was the 362nd Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

Testing the waters.

Video. It’s a whole other discipline that has opened up to photographers over the past couple of years with the advent of HD DSLR cameras such as the Canon 5D Mark II. A lot of people rushed out to get these cameras and dived straight into video. A few succeeded and started making rich and involved video features while others shot a bit of shaky video, tried to edit it into some cohesive presentation and ultimately stuck with still photography.

A third group, of which I include myself, bought cameras of this sort solely for the still photography features. I bought a 5D Mark II two years ago and didn’t even bother finding out how to enter video mode for the first few months. It just didn’t interest me in the slightest. And when I did finally open the manual and decide to find out how to use the video mode, all I did was learn what buttons to push. I probably spent about 10 minutes with it and that was it. Fast forward another three months and I went out one late summer day in 2009 and shot some video for a couple of hours but didn’t ever get around to editing it into anything and it still sits in a rough format on a couple of hard drives.

This year working with the team at FirstZoom Studios, I saw how they use DSLR video, with custom rigs, big tripods, external monitors and long nights in front of a computer editing it. The results were great but I was definitely glad it was them not me doing it. I like traveling light, and the idea of lugging around all that extra gear is a bit of a turn off. Great if video is your main purpose but for my creative needs where photography comes first, it’s a little impractical.

Recently however, I decided I wanted to give it a go. I’m not sure why but probably for a combination of reasons. When I recently created my multimedia bio with Soundslides Plus, after converting it for a YouTube upload, a friend asked me why I didn’t make it in HD. The only reason was that the Soundslides Plus online video converter doesn’t do that, and understandably so. The software is essentially for multimedia slideshows not HD video. But the comment spurred the idea to create a HD version and for that, I turned to Premiere Pro. With the help of some lynda.com tutorials, I gave myself a 4 hours crash course in how to use it and was able to put together the bio in HD. So far, so good, Why not go a step further and try some motion?

So I did. Last week I’d organized a photoshoot out near a waterfall with a few photographer friends and 2 models. We were aiming for a yoga theme with one, and an outdoors / hiking theme with the other. While some of the other photographers were shooting the models, I wandered around shooting some HD video. I didn’t take any special equipment with me – it was all either handheld or shot on a monopod.

Looking at the videos the next day on the computer, it seemed that there’d be enough usable footage to out together a behind the scenes type video. Some of it was a bit shaky but some of ith was fairly steady, even the handheld stuff. After that, it was simply a matter of creating a timeline – and here I actually started with video from the end of the shoot and finished with stuff from the beginning. A bit of searching around for some Creative Commons licensed music that would be appropriate and it came together fairly easily. Take a look at it below.

All in all, it was a lot of fun to make and I’ve already had some good feedback and a few new ideas have come to me. I’m looking forward to exploring this field some more.

That was the 361st Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

One of the secondary subjects in an ongoing project.

What do you do when things don’t go according to plan? If you’re on assignment or involved in a particular project and something crops up to cause a change in scope, can you adapt? Will you be able to cover the changes that occur or will the whole thing have to be scrapped? There’s always the risk that things won’t go according to plan, and the bigger and more involved the particular project is, the higher the risk that something will happen to derail or alter it.

In mid-November I began shooting an environmental project. Originally, it had about a 6 week timescale to shoot and edit into a multimedia production, with an early January publishing date aimed for. There were a number of components to it including background research, interviews with experts, and a variety of different subjects to be photographed. Everything was progressing smoothly, although poor weather was making a few shots tough to get. Fortunately, enough time was budgeted so that the likelihood of getting at least one good, blue sky day for shooting was high. After the first couple of weeks produced rainy and cloudy conditions everyday it was getting a bit frustrating but eventually I knew that the weather would cooperate and it did.

With those shots mostly in the bag, it was time to move on to the next subject in the project and here’s where the snag occurred. One of the subjects of the story disappears at the end of summer and doesn’t make a reappearance until the following spring. With a mid-November start and a planned late December finish, that meant decisions had to made as to whether to publish without this particular subject, or delay the project and wait until mid year in 2011 to publish. What to do?

I first carefully evaluated all the imagery that I already had and all that was still possible to shoot at this time of year. I then looked over the original scope to decide whether the missing subject was important enough to warrant a delay. In this case, the whole project was a self-assigned project and thus it made the decision easier to make. The January publication deadline was one I had given myself and so it could easily be altered and that’s what I chose to do. I feel that waiting until next summer to be able to shoot this last subject and include it will ultimately make the whole project stronger. That said, it wouldn’t have been too difficult to have gone with what was possible now as the main scope of the assignment is covered. If this was an outside-assigned project and the deadline couldn’t be pushed back until summer, it still would have been more than possible to produce a strong package that met all the requirements. The luxury of having the ability to delay is great but not at all necessary. The key point to keep in mind is that anything can happen that causes plans to change and you have to be able to cope with those changes if and when they occur.

That was the 360th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

You don't have to go all the way to Varansi, India to tell a story. November 2001

As it’s Christmas Day, today’s will be a quick tip.

A recent Depth of Field podcast that Matt Brandon did with Brian Storm of Media Storm concluded with Brian saying about photography that “it’s better than it’s ever been”. And it is. Never has it been so easy for so many to shoot, create and publish compelling photographs, video and multimedia. So get out there and do it. Take your camera and tell a story. Any story. You can find them everywhere. The worst that will happen is that it will suck. That’s okay. If it does suck, keep going. Tell another story and keep going until it doesn’t suck. Simple. Start something new today.

That was the 359th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.